to count or number, and by extension to weigh out, allot, and appoint
At its root this verb means to count: to tally people, stars, days, or money. The same act of counting out easily becomes weighing out a share and assigning a portion, so the word stretches from plain arithmetic to a sovereign decision about who gets what. This is why one Hebrew word can mean both to number a crowd and to appoint a fate.
When God is the one counting, the word carries real weight. Only God can count what people cannot, the offspring of Abraham like the dust of the earth or the stars of the sky. To number one's own days is to reckon with how few they are and gain wisdom. And when David counts his fighting men, the act itself becomes an offense, because he is treating the covenant people as a resource to be tallied.
In its stronger uses the word turns from counting to appointing.
- God appoints a great fish, a plant, a worm, and a wind to teach the reluctant prophet Jonah.
- A foreign king appoints the daily rations for his captives.
- Nights of misery are allotted to Job.
The one who counts is the one who allots, so the verb becomes a way of saying that a person, a thing, or an entire destiny has been assigned by decree. In one striking case God warns that he will allot idol-worshippers to the sword, answering a pagan god of fate with the very word from which that god took its name.
Nuances
How to read the servant being "numbered with the transgressors" at Isaiah 53:12: as a plain statement of shared fate, as a willing self-identification, or as an accounting-style reckoning.
- majorityA plain statement that the servant was grouped with wrongdoers, sharing their fate in death.; Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40-66 (OTL), p. 267; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Bible 19A, 2002), p. 344; Shalom Paul, Isaiah 40-66 (Eerdmans, 2012)
- minorityA willing, self-chosen identification: he let himself be counted among rebels, stressing his voluntariness.; John Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40-55 (ICC, 2006)
- minorityA juridical or accounting reckoning: the Greek Old Testament renders it "reckoned among the lawless," the reading taken up in Luke 22:37.; Septuagint, Isaiah 53:12 (elogisthe); cited Luke 22:37